Essay on Reconsidering cultural imperialism theory
In the essay I am going to deal with cultural imperialism of Hollywood and transnationalism as well throughout the movie Rush Hour, which is is an American martial arts action comedy style movie filmed in 1998. It was directed by Brett Ratner and starring Hong Kong actor Jackie Chan and American star Chris Tucker.
Some new form of colonialism has appeared recently – the so called “cultural imperialism.” This term refers to the obtrusiveness of American user culture into the daily life of the usual global citizen. All in all this term explains the spreading of the dominating western culture, traditions, products, values, etc, and in this way changing and even wiping off all the local culture features.
I’d like to mention some facts about the history of Cultural Imperialism Theory, which started explains many of the contemporary global processes. Contemplation about cultural imperialism appeared in the post-World War II period. It had many different names, including “neo-colonialism,” “soft imperialism,” and “economic imperialism.” While the years were passing, this term has received a great amount of other labels such as “media imperialism,” “structural imperialism,” cultural dependency and synchronization,” “electronic colonialism,” “ideological imperialism,” and “communication imperialism.” (White, Livingston A. 2001). Such theories referring and explaining cultural imperialism appeared in the 1960s and became much more prominent by the 1970s. Actually such investigation supported the creation of international organizations, for example such as UNESCO, established to learn about and monitor world global informational flows (Kuldip R. Rampal. 1998).
While watching the movie we can notice in what way it shows the Americanizing of the world. This is a classic American action movie with classic plot about two different cops having the same task and becoming best friends in the process of investigation. Chris Tucker’s behavior is very bright and he is ready to show his minimal knowledge and interest in some other cultures except of his own. Detective James Carter is fond of American food and argues with the seller of Chinese food, although he kind of likes it after trying. While speaking about the historic heritage of China this character doesn’t show too much of respect to the values which are nor really important for him. Also he gets very angry when he learns that his new partner doesn’t speak English to him and behaves in a quite demeaning way. Here we see the beginning the process of developing of the classic plot of the comedy action movie.
Transnationalism definitely occurs in many places of the movie in its own way, probably even more often than just the cases of showing American dominating culture. To start with actors: By themselves, Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker are both well-known actors, and they wouldn’t provide something really new and refreshing, but after these two were combined, the actors formed a strikingly entertaining hilarious duet. In particular, these two characters show the relationships between hip-hop culture and Hong Kong kung-fu martial arts culture. Let’s remember the episode when the heroes are teaching each other to move, to dance, to take the weapon from the enemy and to fight. Here we meet a classic Afro-American rapper and Asian kung-fu fighter. As we see they both differ from the majority of Americans and represent their own subcultures. On the other hand it looks to me like the multicultural performance of minorities such as Asian-Americans, African-Americans, and Asians in such Hollywood movies like Rush Hour and many others, nevertheless, only show us once again the dominating racial debate, because these two different characters differ from the majority of the characters as well.
As for women in the movie, I’d like to mention the transnational ‘new’ Asian lady (who is flexible, competent, polyethnic, polyglot, and competitive, although very often kind of cold, dangerous, deracinated, and unappealing)”. This is the kind of Chinese women we meet in the Chinese restaurant, when Lee was almost poisoned to death by one of them. This is a new type of Asian female characters which differs a lot from traditional Chinese type from Asian movies. I’d like to mention that this new type of an Americanized Chinese woman is much closer to the actual image of an American lady. Detective Tania Johnson is an American policewoman, a brave helper, a bit rude in her attitude and always ready for the action and shooting. She is really upset about Carter going to the operation himself and not taking her, so she is competitive too.
Humor is a very important topic as it characterizes the people’s mentality in a very clear way. And by the way the movie is a comedy action, so speaking about humor in the movie, it is very often connected to the races and forbidden words are used in the movie (the N word for example when Lee calls the barman with this name and gets in fight as he didn’t what that word could mean and that it is very offensive to Afro-Americans, etc). This humor can’t be called multinational, it is very American, as the problem of races is not so much important in many countries where the majority of the population belongs to only one people (particularly China, Hing Kong and many other Asian countries).
It is very interesting to read Jackie Chan’s opinion about the movie which was one of his big break-outs and also gave him very good financial benefits: “When we finished filming, I felt very disappointed because it was a movie I didn’t appreciate and I did not like the action scenes involved. I felt the style of action was too Americanized and I didn’t understand the American humor,” Chan said in a blog entry on his Web site. (The official web site of Jackie Chan. 2005). I will totally agree with the actor, who felt that other non-American people may find the humor not funny or difficult to understand, so that the movie wouldn’t be transnational for Asians for example. As for other jokes, they looked like classic American action movies jokes, like in the episodes when Detective James Carter kicks terrorist after saying with funny voice some inappropriate phrase and kills Sang and says: ‘Wipe this off. You are dead’’.
On the other hand the main human values such like love of the father to his daughter and care of the family’s friend about a little girl is transnational and is well understood by all the characters, even by Clive, the man who was trying to sell some C4 explosive to Carter out of his car. Clive looked in the eyes of Lee and decided to help the investigation. Also both leading characters had their fathers working in police and doing great job, both were killed while fulfilling their duty. They both respect their parent and use them as a role model and example, but there is a little difference here too: Lee considers duty and honor much more important than his opinion about the situation, while Carter thinks that his father shouldn’t have died in the street shot by some criminal for nothing, as he understands that. Also friendship is shown in the movie as something more than partnership, the heroes are saving lives of each other, but they also show their feelings for each other in a very different ways: Lee even kisses Carter after he saved Chan’s character’s life. This is very inappropriate for the American style of the male behavior, so Carter is really embarrassed by that move of his partner. This is just one more example of the difference in the mentalities of behavior in different cultures.
To make a conclusion I want to say that Rush Hour movie is a classic Americanized action movie, illustrating American humor, women type, gender relationships, food, attitude to the job, other cultures and languages and many other aspects of life. It shows traditional American movie plot and stereotypical Hollywood characters, such as FBI officers, police informers, policewomen, antagonists or just ‘’bad guys’’. The movie with foreign actors still remains an American movie produced by all the Hollywood ‘’rules and policies’’, lows of genre. On the other hand we may notice such transnational aspects as family values, professionalism, desire to get the job done, communication between an Afro-American and a Chinese policemen, growing feeling of friendship and gratitude between them.
